December 22, 2013
St. Peter's Episcopal Church, Oxford, MS
Year A, 4th Sunday of Advent, Isaiah 7:10-16

            A great uncle of mine often tells me that the thing you’re most afraid of is never the thing that gets you in the end. As this man has seen an awful lot, I take his words to heart. And even though it’s not the happiest message, we cannot deny that in our lifetimes some amount of tragedy will touch each of us. Something likely will get us in the end, if not before. His point in reminding me of this—that the thing you’re most afraid of is never the thing that gets you—is that worrying about our deepest fear does us absolutely no good. That of course, doesn’t keep me from worrying.            

            This is kind of the spot that Ahaz, king of Judah, the Southern Kingdom of Israel, finds himself in in our Old Testament reading from today. We learn in the verses preceding the lectionary text that the hearts of Ahaz and his people have been shaken by the news of two other kingdoms out to get Ahaz. One is what we now know as Syria and the other was the northern kingdom of Israel. Together, they hoped to depose the Judean king and replace him with a ruler more sympathetic to their desires, but the actuality of a successful campaign was unlikely. Even so, Ahaz’s heart is shaken and so God sends Isaiah of Jerusalem to reassure him. So when we meet him, Ahaz is scared and worrying about something that’s probably not going to happen, and in fact does not, and we have Isaiah pleading with him to get it together and have a little faith in God.

            And in fact not only does Isaiah plead with Ahaz, but Isaiah has God Godself telling Ahaz that he can have a sign, any sign. “You need faith?” God seems to say. “Ask me for a sign.” Now, it’s maybe important to note a couple of things about this. Ahaz is not asking God for a sign, it’s the other way around, and so Ahaz is not in any way putting God to the test, as Ahaz will claim in a move of false piety.

            And second, and more important, it might seem that a sign from God would be a great good thing. And I myself have often thought neon above me or skywriting might be helpful. “I am here, Jennifer. Really.” It would be wonderful to know finally and for certain that God is with me, with all of us.

            But when I really consider it, that notion can also be terribly frightening. If God is with us, with me, after all, and I know that for sure, then I have zero excuse in not surrendering my own will to God’s. If we know that God is with us, then we have absolutely no excuse for going our own way and not God’s way. And letting go, acknowledging our inability to control much of anything is a hard and fearful thing. It is much, much easier, safer, at least it has been in my life, to ignore the signs of God around me, and go my own way, trusting in my own ability and wherewithal. I haven’t seen the words “I am here” in pink neon or airplane exhaust, and maybe there is some part of me that really would rather not.  

            Ahaz certainly would rather not. Ahaz, like most of us, would rather choose his own way, and so instead of looking to God, he looks to and solicits help from the king of Assyria, the superpower of his day, which no doubt makes good political sense. And while reaching out to Assyria is partly a reaction to the fear of attack by the two kingdoms to his north, I think perhaps Ahaz is mostly afraid of surrendering control to God.

            As Jewish scholar Abraham Heschel says, “It was more expedient to be ‘son and servant’ to the King of Assyria than son and servant to the invisible God.”[1] And as the great Bob Dylan says, “Everybody’s gotta serve somebody.” And if it’s not somebody it’s some thing. You know the list: money, influence, power. But we might add to that list the many less obvious but perhaps more insidious things that we serve in place of God every day. It is easy to de-center God in our lives when what we put at the center is good and respected. For me, these days, that’s usually schoolwork and the endless meetings associated with living as part of a seminary community. Like Ahaz pleading that he will not put God to the test, I often find myself in the same mindset, fooling myself into believing for days at a time that because I’m focusing on all there is to do at seminary, I’m actually focused on God. And I’m good at this. I can very easily fool myself into believing I’m actually focused on God when I’ve taken zero time to consult with God, to try to hear God, when I’ve taken absolutely no time to notice the many ways in which God is in fact with me. When, in short, I blindly assert my own control over God’s.

            Franciscan friar and priest Richard Rohr writes that “When Christianity aligns itself with power (and the mindset of power, which is the need to be right and always in control) there’s simply very little room for the darkness of faith; that spacious place where God is actually able to form us. . . .  Faith can only happen in this very special threshold space.” And he adds, “You don’t really do faith, it happens to you when you give up control and all the steering of your ship.”[2]

             And usually that control is not given up easily. We give up steering generally only when something bad has happened and we no longer have the strength within us to hold the wheel steady. Rohr goes on to say that “you fall into [faith] more than ever fully choosing it, and only then do you know how grace, love, and God can sustain you and strengthen you at very deep levels.”[3]

            But we can choose faith. We don’t have to wait for tragedy to strike, for our strength to be zapped, to give up control to God. We can choose today, right now, to be sons and daughters and servants of the invisible God, as Heschel says. And this is good and right since when we are not children and servants of God, we are necessarily children and servants of people and entities and ideas that are not God, and so can only lead us down paths of self-selected exile from God.

            When we meet Ahaz, Isaiah has warned him, “If you do not stand firm in faith, / you shall not stand at all” (Isaiah 7:9b), and that is exactly what happens. In his fear of giving over control to God, Ahaz loses all control to the king of Assyria. Giving himself and his people up to an expedient solution, Ahaz leads his people down the long but slippery slope that will eventually end in Babylonian exile. Much more sadly, though, Ahaz misses out on the perfect freedom and joy of serving God, of knowing the depth of God’s love for him. Ahaz shows us that not standing firm in faith, not recognizing God with us, is not standing at all. And I can attest from my own life, it is not living. Not really.

            But the very good news here that Isaiah proclaims is that despite our faithlessness, God is nevertheless with us, since God, unlike you or me, is always faithful. Despite our unwillingness to let God take control of our lives, God is nevertheless ready and willing to do so. We need only ask. “You don’t want a sign, Ahaz? Too bad. I am here,” God says. God is ready and waiting for us whenever we are ready to turn to God.

            “Look, the young woman is with child, and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel,” (meaning of course, God is with us). And not only that, but in two or three years, that kid’s gonna be eating milk and honey, the food of abundance. And what’s more, those kings you were so worried about, won’t even be around. But God will, Isaiah proclaims to the faithless Ahaz.

            Scholars have wasted a lot ink trying to figure out who this young woman was—this young woman whom Matthew and Luke will of course read as ultimately pointing to Mary—and while it’s interesting to speculate about the woman, her role is really not all that important here.

            What is important for Isaiah, and for the Gospel writers, was that God is in fact among us. Ahaz refuses God’s offer for a sign. But God in God’s goodness, in God’s never-ending faithfulness to us, provides one anyway. We refuse to be faithful, and God seems to love us anyway, forever calling us back to Godself, with the absolute assurance that there is new and abundant life in following God and not our own ways.  

            This new and abundant life of course does not shield us from tragedy, but this new life allows us to face whatever may happen to us in faith, in the knowledge that God is with us, sustaining us with God’s immeasurable grace and love. God desires us and so is ready and waiting for us to know how much each of us is loved. That is God’s promise to us. That is the story of Israel and that is our story. We have only to accept it. I pray that each of us may do so as we await the coming of the Christ child, God with us, Immanuel.

---

[1] Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper and Row, 1962),

[2] Richard Rohr, “Daily Meditation,” email from the Center for Contemplation and Action, 12/13/13.

[3] Ibid.

Another (longer) sermon . . .

December 8, 2013
St. Christopher's Episcopal Church, Springfield, VA
Year A, 2nd Sunday of Advent, Matthew 3:1-12

            Flannery O’Connor, the great 20^th century American fiction writer, who also happened to be a devout Roman Catholic, knew something about Pharisees, and also knew a little about the kingdom of God. In her short story “Revelation,” set mostly in a doctor’s waiting room in the Jim Crow South, Mrs. Turpin, a truly nasty and racist “good Christian” woman, gives thanks that she is not like the others in that room—not trashy or ugly, or black.

            And while I imagine O’Connor based this story on the Pharisee who thanks God that he is not like the tax collector in Luke’s gospel, there are good parallels here to today’s gospel lesson.

            Mrs. Turpin has her so-called “revelation,” which I’ll get to in a bit, after a particularly homely young woman attacks her in the waiting room. This girl, back home from school up North, in a crazed fit can no longer take Mrs. Turpin’s running commentary on everything that is wrong with those who are lesser in Mrs. Turpin’s eyes. Mrs. Turpin is not all bad, though, especially not in her own estimation. She does, after all, do a lot for her church and is an upstanding citizen, who, with her husband, owns her own home and small farm.

            But this young woman can’t take it anymore. And so she lunges at and throttles Mrs. Turpin and calls her a “wart hog from hell.” And much more than the physical attack, it is what this girl says that causes Mrs. Turpin to take a good long look at herself.

            I can’t help but hope that John the Baptist’s name-calling—“you brood of vipers”—caused the Pharisees and Sadducees in our gospel lesson also to take a good long look at themselves.

            In the gospel lesson we just heard, John the Baptist, is doing his crazy John the Baptist thing, with the camel’s hair and the locusts and all of that. And in Matthew’s gospel he bursts onto the scene, proclaiming that the kingdom of heaven has come near and that all should repent—that is, turn toward God.

            And throngs of people are coming out to be baptized by him. Scholars don’t know for sure where this tradition of baptism came from, but people nevertheless were going out to be baptized. And not only that, they were also confessing their sins.        

            That so many people were going out to John is understandable in light of the fact that the Israelites had been waiting for several centuries for Elijah to return to announce the Messiah. And as Matthew presents him, John is very much an Elijah figure.

            So John is doing his crazy John the Baptist thing and along come the Pharisees and Sadducees, John’s own Mrs. Turpins. And just as a reminder, the Pharisees of course were that sect that wanted to expand on and extend that expanded law into all areas of life for all Jewish people. They very much believed in living by the letter of the law. A lot of law. And the Sadducees, who were traditionally hostile to the Pharisees—but let’s give our gospel writer some poetic license here—didn’t go in for the expanded law of the Pharisees but certainly strictly maintained the Torah and were dedicated Temple worshipers.

            And it’s important that we remember that John, himself a Jew, is not bashing Jews. He was baptizing lots and lots of Jewish people. So John the Baptist’s condemnation of the Pharisees and Sadducees has nothing to do with their Jewishness but everything to do with their striving for status, and not living according to the law they professed. It has to do with their treatment of those they perceived to be of a lower status. And it has to do with their using the law, which he is also not bashing, as a tool against those they perceived as lesser.

            In short, they were not bearing good fruit.

            Theologian and ethicist Stanley Hauerwas writes that John’s somewhat puzzling and very harsh treatment of the Pharisees and Sadducees “anticipates Jesus’s biting critique of how these so-called authorities fail to lead lives congruent with their advocacy of God’s law.”[1]

            And so John is pretty hard on them, calling them, a “brood of vipers,” literally, “sons of snakes.” And he refuses to baptize them—and it’s not clear whether they were actually seeking baptism or just coming out to inspect what was going on. But he refuses to baptize them and then, he says a lot of things about fruit and fire.

            Fruit and fire—and this is important. This is a theme that Jesus himself will take up in Matthew’s gospel more than once. And, as you probably know, in Matthew’s gospel good fruit is ultimately tied, later in chapter 25, to feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, clothing the naked, tending the sick, visiting the imprisoned. Good fruit is about caring for the least among us.

            The Pharisees and Sadducees are vipers—slithering, poisonous snakes—because they have lived in a way that has not borne good fruit, to mix metaphors. And now presumably these trees that have not borne good fruit are being cut down and thrown into the fire. And if two metaphors weren’t enough, our gospel writer has John say that one greater is coming and that one is gonna separate the wheat from the chaff. That one is gonna throw the chaff into the fire.

            Talk about a hot mess. It all seems like pretty terrible news for the Pharisees and Sadducees. And pretty bad news for me and you, who—let’s face it—probably bear just as much bad fruit as good on any given day. And let’s not forget Mrs. Turpin. This is terrible news for her, it would seem.

            In O’Connor’s story, Mrs. Turpin is mortified by the young woman’s attack on her. She cannot believe that she, an upstanding white middle-class Christian woman, is a “wart hog from hell.” But the crazed young woman no doubt speaks truth in some way.

            I am not advocating name-calling. But the kingdom of God has come near for Mrs. Turpin. And the kingdom of God is near for us; God is calling us through Matthew’s gospel to bear fruit worthy of repentance. In this season of Advent as we await the birth of the Christ child, we might, like Mrs. Turpin, take some time to reflect on the fruit that we have borne, that we bear in our day-to-day lives. We might take some time to repent, to turn back to God, and confess our sins, so that we might bear good fruit.

            Stanley Hauerwas says that all of this that John the Baptist is proclaiming causes Christians to “rightly read and hear” this “with apprehension and guilt. But guilt,” he says, “is seldom a useful position to assume for a faithful response to God’s word. Far more important is that we respond, as John demands, to the one who has come to baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire.”[2]

            Fire, again. In the middle of the trees that are being cut down and burned up and the chaff that will be burned, John tells us that Jesus baptizes with the Holy Spirit and fire.

            And that’s where Mrs. Turpin comes back in. As she ponders the words of the young woman after she is back home, Mrs. Turpin has a vision, and it is a clear and real vision of the kingdom of God. As she looks up into the red-streaked sunset, she sees herself marching along to heaven. But to her surprise she is in the very last group of those making their way to heaven. She is marching behind the hordes of people for whom she has had so much disdain, on account of whom she has borne so very much bad fruit. She is marching behind, as O’Connor tells it, “freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs.”[3] She is marching behind them and in her very real and clear vision of this heavenly procession, she can see her “shocked and altered” face as even her “virtues are being burned away.”[4] As even her “virtues are being burned away.”

            Mrs. Turpin is in the heavenly procession not because she is a good Christian, but because God loves her—or if she were real, because God would love her—just as he loves you and me. Immeasurably. Without bound. Without qualification. Enough to want us to produce good fruit. Enough to burn away those parts of us that produce bad fruit.

            We are all part Pharisee. We are all part Mrs. Turpin. And sometimes bearing good fruit is hard when those parts of ourselves take over, when we lose sight of just how much God loves us. But we can rest assured that God loves us anyway. That God loves us enough to burn away, in the end, all that is unfruitful within us.

            So in this season of Advent, let us repent, let us turn back to God, and confess our sins in the knowledge that the unquenchable fire of God’s love through Jesus Christ will in the end consume all the Pharisee and all the Mrs. Turpin within us. Let us repent, let us turn back to God, and confess our sins, so that in the meantime, in the here-and-now time, we might produce the fruit that God so desires of us and for us.

            Amen.

             

---

[1] Hauerwas, Stanly, Matthew (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2006), 46.

[2] Ibid., 47

[3] O’Connor, Flannery, “Revelation” in The Complete Short Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971), 508.

[4] Ibid.

So, I've been idle in regards to the blog. Please accept my sincere apologies. This year has been even busier than last. The good news is that I preached today, so I have something to post. My first-ever sermon at my field ed site:

St. Christopher's Episcopal Church, Springfield, VA
Year C, Season after Pentecost, Proper 28, 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13

            So, I identify with the idle (and that’s the I-D-L-E of our epistle). And while we don’t know exactly what was going on that prompted this second letter to the church at Thessalonica, we do know that there were people there not doing what they were supposed to. Not carrying their weight. Not contributing to the community. Loafers. Slackers. Deadbeats.

            But why not, really? Why not loaf?

            I, for one, can understand that urge. Our reading from Isaiah this morning promises us a new heaven and a new earth. But when? In the Gospel lesson, we hear Jesus saying that in the end times there will be earthquakes and famines and plagues. But for how long? 2,000 years?

            I don’t know about you, but that seems excessive to me. And so in the midst of all the atrocious pain that we now witness day-to-day in the news—from shootings to typhoons—and not to mention the less-newsworthy suffering of our own lives—the urge for me at last is to sit back, to become idle, to pursue my own interests and ignore the world around me.

            While I worry about how long it might take for this new heaven and new earth to appear, this is sort of the opposite of what some scholars believe was going on in Thessalonica.

A little context may help. Paul had founded the church at Thessalonica a couple decades after Jesus. And being a busy guy and unable to return as quickly as the community there would’ve liked, Paul wrote the letter we now know as First Thessalonians. And in that letter (which was written around the year 50 and happens to be the earliest preserved Christian writing) Paul urges the Thessalonians to continue doing what they’re doing and to stay strong. Jesus would be right back, after all. They were living in the end times, Paul thought.

            And so fast forward (and, unfortunately, we don’t how much to fast forward, since scholars disagree on the date of Second Thessalonians). So fast forward maybe a year or maybe even some decades, but fast forward nonetheless, and what we have is perhaps Paul but maybe a follower of Paul writing in his name, sending another letter to the Thessalonians. And this time, we get this somewhat strange warning about idleness.

            But again, why not be idle? Perhaps Paul had been a little too convincing about the Second Coming in the first letter. If that event was in fact right around the corner, why not take a day off, or two, or twenty? Not to mention that the Christians at Thessalonica had seen their fair share of persecution because of their faith. That alone was enough to make any good Thessalonian Christian want to slack a little.

            And, for whatever reason, some did. And not only did some become idle, but they also became “busybodies,” meddlers, worried about others’ affairs while not tending to their own. And again, this is something I can relate to.

            I can assure you, that in living with a bunch of seminarians, it’s easy to meddle. I, for one, am really good at pointing out what everyone else ought to be doing. And it is generally not a good feeling when I discover that my only contribution to the betterment of the community has been sitting back and offering criticism.

            But back to the Thessalonians. Here, we get this passage in our lectionary that twice invokes the name of Jesus Christ and uses some pretty strong language.

            And I think maybe that’s because our writer understood just how much the Thessalonian Christians needed one another.  This message is really about community. We are, after all, called to do all sorts of really hard things when we accept the call to follow Christ. Things like seeking and serving Christ in all persons. And we can’t do those things alone—at least, I can’t. We need community. We need one another.

            German Lutheran theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonheoffer, writes in his book Life Together, his meditation on Christian community, that the Christian “needs his brother solely because of Jesus Christ. The Christ in his own heart is weaker than the Christ in the word of his brother; his own heart is uncertain, his brother’s is sure.”[1]

            So we need one another. And this morning’s epistle indicates further that we need to be able to hold one another accountable in love and mutual respect. That probably doesn’t mean that if you or I forget our potluck dish, we shouldn’t eat. But maybe it means that we do need to sit down at potlucks together occasionally, and of course to break bread together regularly, to worship together, to study together—to feed one another spiritually, and not just so that we may be fed, but much more so, so that we might be able to go outside these walls and feed a hurting world.

            And, just as a side note, let me be clear that this passage is not about people unable to work because of ability or the myriad systemic circumstances that prevent people from working today. Rather, it’s about unwillingness to take part in the life of the community. And for us here today, I think it speaks to our willingness to do the work that God has called on us to do. To do the work of ushering in the new heaven that we just heard about in Isaiah, to be the hands and feet of Christ in the here and now.  

            Are we living in the end times, as the Thessalonians believed they were? I don’t know. Will humans be waiting another 2,000 years or more for the Kingdom of God to finally and fully be realized? I don’t know. But I do know we are called to usher in that kingdom, to show forth the love of God through Christ as best we are able. This is true life, after all. This is the only life worth living, Scripture teaches us again and again. And it is a life we are able to achieve only through the help of God, whom I believe shows up most clearly in our relationships with one another in community.

            Nevertheless, I very much sympathize with the idle. And I can be a pretty good slacker. But I ask you to remind me, and I pray that we may all remind one another—through our words but more so through our actions—that as a community of brothers and sisters in Christ, we are to love another. And we are to celebrate and affirm God’s immeasurable love for us through Christ so that we might share that love in tangible ways outside the walls of this church.

            I can understand the idleness. But it’s the community that brings me back and allows me to hope in the love of God through Christ. It’s the community that holds on to hope when I can’t. And in so doing, it’s the community that helps me see—when I’m feeling particularly drawn to idleness—that God is in fact among us.

            The writer of Second Thessalonians urges that community two millenia removed from us  “not to be weary of doing what is right” (3:13). May we also not grow weary. 

Amen.         

                      

---

[1]Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1954), 23.

So I am a middler now, which means classes on ethics, systematic theology, homiletics (preaching), and field education (internship in a local parish for the next two years). I'm also taking a course on the Letter to the Hebrews and one more quarter of Greek. The August term Greek class was great and I had happy flashbacks to 7th grade, where I spent a lot of time on worksheets that involved labeling all the words in sentences according to their usage. I'm not sure what it says about me that grammar makes me so happy.

It's been fascinating and fun to watch the new class settle in at VTS and I am happy to report they're considerably calmer than my class, which gained a reputation for being a bit "wild" last year. I didn't really contribute to that--mostly just because I'm old--and while I am relieved there don't seem to be as many strong personalities (and strong livers) in the new class, I do love my class. I told my friend and classmate who is essentially a big male version of me (we share all the same personality traits and even sub-traits according to the Meyers-Briggs) that I really think it was good for me to be part of the wildness that is the Class of 2015. (He agreed that he also loves our class.) It disabused me of any notion whatsoever that priests-to-be (and priests) are of a holier class than anybody else--not that I felt or feel in any way particularly holy. More than anything, I was a little worried before coming to seminary that I maybe wasn't quite holy enough. Thankfully, I've realized we're not called to be "holy." God knows I'd fail every single time.

This all makes me think of Eugene Peterson, the Presbyterian minister and translator (he's responsible for The Message paraphrase of the Bible) and something he wrote about pastors (stolen from bishopalan.blogspot.com):

The biblical fact is that there are no successful churches. There are, instead, communities of sinners, gathered before God week after week in towns and villages all over the world. The Holy Spirit gathers them and does his work in them. In these communities of sinners, one of the sinners is called pastor and given a designated responsibility in the community. The pastor’s responsibility is to keep the community attentive to God. . . .

We know that you are launched on the same difficult belief venture in the same dangerous world as we are. We know that your emotions are as fickle as ours, and that your mind can play the same tricks on you as ours. That is why we are going to ordain you and why we are going to exact a vow from you. 

We know that there are going to be days and months, maybe even years, when we won’t feel like we are believing anything and won’t want to hear it from you. And we know that there will be days and weeks and maybe even years when you won’t feel like saying it. It doesn’t matter. Do it. You are ordained to this ministry, vowed to it. 

There may be times when we come to you as a committee or delegation and demand that you tell us something else than what we are telling you now. Promise, right now, that you won’t give in to what we demand of you then. You are not the minister of our changing desires, or our time-conditioned understanding of our needs, or our secularized hopes for something better. With these vows of ordination we are lashing you fast to the mast of word and sacrament so that you will be unable to respond to the siren voices. 

There are a lot of other things to be done in this wrecked world and we are going to be doing at least some of them, but if we don’t know the basic terms with which we are working, the foundational realities with which we are dealing — God, kingdom, gospel — we are going to end up living futile, fantasy lives. 

Your task is to keep telling the basic story, representing the presence of the Spirit, insisting on the priority of God, speaking the biblical words of command and promise and invitation.

Three days left of CPE, thanks be to God. It was a lot of hard work and not so fun to see people suffering several days a week, but I learned a ton and I understand why it's an ordination requirement.

Some things I learned in no particular order: lots of people are homeless because of untreated mental illness; lots of people develop addictions because they're trying to self medicate mental illness; there are a lot of pastors out there telling people really dumb stuff, like, you'll know your dead baby granddaughter is okay if you see a shooting star at midnight, or, if God had wanted you to have a new liver, God would have given you a liver; gratitude is transformational; our healthcare system is way screwed up; the church universal has let a whole lot of people slip through the cracks; I say I'm sorry a lot and often for no good reason; you can be shot and killed over a fish sandwich; there are a whole bunch of people shooting a whole lot of hard drugs into their veins and they come from all socioeconomic backgrounds; I still pass out if I see images of IV drug use, especially if I haven't eaten; you can be young, attractive, successful, married to a seemingly good guy, an avid churchgoer and still drink yourself to death, literally; men who don't believe in "lady pastors' will nevertheless talk nonstop to a lady chaplain for an entire hour, which is totally okay, since the talk is not happening in a church; I don't really like talking about my feelings; people trying to decide whether to withdraw life support for their mother/father/daughter/son/sister/brother/spouse will ask you what they should do if you happen to tell them you're a chaplain; lots of people are really scared to talk to God; lots of people believe God is punishing them; I'm a little gun-shy about my "pastoral authority"; lots of people don't believe God loves them unconditionally, and so don't believe God loves them; I'm more certain than ever that whatever you did, whatever you didn't do, God loves you anyway.

Also, here's a sermon I delivered for UAB's Episcopal Campus Ministries service earlier in the summer. The campus ministries chaplain asked if I'd talk some about CPE, which is why so much of it is focused on that. Also, I'm very excited to take homiletics this year and to work on sermon writing.

June 23, 2013
Luke 8:26-39

I just finished my first year at Virginia Theological Seminary. Back at VTS in the fall, my New Testament professor made a comment to me and a few other students that I sort of laughed off. She said, “Typically, we have a group of VTS students who go over to the Dominican House"—and the Dominican House is a place of study for young men hoping to become part of the Dominican Order in the Roman Catholic Church—"and take the exorcism class they teach there.” She went on to say that “if you’re really unlucky in your career as a priest, you may have to perform one exorcism. It’s really a much better idea to take a class on a gospel instead.”

And it seems true that Episcopal priests, at least the ones I know, and I think most clergy, just don’t assume that all that many people will be asking them to perform exorcisms. So I was a bit taken aback when someone asked me if I would in fact perform an exorcism a few weeks ago. I very much hope that doesn’t mean I’m unlucky.

  I’ve been here in Birmingham since the end of May working as a hospital chaplain at UAB. I’m completing what is called “clinical pastoral education,” or “CPE,” as part of the ordination requirements for the Episcopal Diocese of Mississippi. CPE, which usually takes the form of hospital chaplaincy, is an ordination requirement among most, if not all, Episcopal dioceses, and is also required of those seeking ordination among several other denominations and traditions.

So I am here working at UAB to meet my CPE requirement. And it was during my very first night on call at the hospital, when I was thankfully shadowing a more experienced chaplain, that I met a young woman who very earnestly and seriously asked me and the other chaplain if we would please perform an exorcism on her.

As you might have imagined, this was on one of the hospital’s psych units. This woman was young and quite beautiful and clearly very intelligent, and unlike a lot of people I’ve seen on the psych units at UAB, she kept saying, “I realize this sounds crazy. I know this makes me sound crazy.” (Most of the people I see on the psych units don’t seem at all worried about sounding “crazy”—her word.) So she would talk about sounding crazy, and then she would recount some very odd incident—such as her boyfriend’s serving her communion, and this boyfriend was someone with split personalities and the communion-serving personality was evil—and all that in her mind proved that she had been, in her words, “marked by the beast.”

“I feel like I’ve been marked by the beast,” she said over and over again. “I know that I’ve been marked by the beast and I’m scared that I can’t get back to God and Jesus and that I will burn in hell.” And that notion clearly terrified her.

And I’m actually not even sure the word terrified does justice to the fear I saw in this woman’s eyes. “I don’t want to burn in hell,” she kept saying. “I believe in God. I want to follow Jesus. But it’s too late. I’ve already been marked.” Terrified. And no wonder. She was completely and utterly convinced that she had moved to a place beyond the reach of any saving help, certainly beyond the reach of society, and even beyond the reach of God.

In that way, she believed herself to be in a place very much like the place where we find the man possessed by demons in tonight’s gospel lesson. This is a man whom the gospel writer tells us lives in “the tombs,” completely removed from the rest of society, except of course for the guard who ensures society is kept safe from the man. This is a man the community has given up on, a man literally living among the dead.

And why not? Clearly, he seems unfit for any other kind of existence. This man, who can’t even manage to clothe himself, is teeming with unclean spirits, and as such, he is continually breaking his chains and being driven off into the wild. He clearly is not in his right mind. He is in fact so totally overcome by his afflictions, his demons, he is unable even to say his name when Jesus asks. Instead, the demons themselves respond. The man is completely and utterly overcome, seemingly, like the young woman on the psych ward, beyond any saving help.

Whether the young woman on the psych ward and the man in the gospel were actually afflicted by demons or by mental illness, each was in a truly dark place, a place they believed to be beyond the reach of God’s saving mercy and love. I would hazard a guess, that while these are no doubt extreme cases, all of us have at some time felt that we, or maybe at least some small part of us, something about us, within us, is beyond God’s reach. If you are like me, you may have a demon or two or three.

Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann says that “We may imagine, in contemporary context, the demons are any form of addiction—drugs, sex, money, power, control, self-promotion. Such demons preclude much of the life that we want to live.” But,” Brueggemann says, “Jesus has the power to give the man a new life of freedom, beyond the grip of all the demons.”

And Jesus does in fact give the man a new life of freedom. In healing the man and casting his demons into the abyss, Jesus shows the man, the Garasenes, and us that there is no darkness that cannot be overcome. Whatever our demons—and we all have them—Jesus has power over them.

Brueggemann says, “In the extremities of our life, we are powerless for ourselves. Just so the man with Jesus is powerless in the face of his demons. But then freedom, restoration, and new life flow through.” Freedom, restoration and new life flow through despite however dark or bad or sinful we may believe our demons to be. Jesus brings us freedom, restoration and new life, whatever our demons, despite how many our demons, despite a whole legion of demons. There is nothing in us that the love of God through Jesus Christ cannot make new. And we do well to remember—I do well to remember—that there is no one so far gone, even on the psych ward, even on our streets and in our prisons, that the love of God can’t reach, can’t restore, can’t make new. And because we, as Christians, have been made new, we like the man in the gospel must proclaim this.

I don’t know how the girl I met that night is doing. I know that she went home a few days after I saw her, and I assume she got at least some of the help she needed. I know that we didn’t have to do an exorcism, but I don’t know exactly how much improved her mental and emotional state were when she left the hospital. I know that I was scared for her that night, because she was so scared and so convinced she was beyond any help. But I was also hopeful, am hopeful, because I know that what she said was not even close to true. There are no demons that Jesus can’t cast out.